-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Call for Participation KI 2011 Date: Thu, 18 Aug 2011 14:23:26 +0200 (CEST) From: gi-mitglieder-info@gi-ev.de To: gustaf.neumann@wu-wien.ac.at
[Apologies if you receive multiple copies. Please distribute this call to interested parties.]
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Call for Participation
KI 2011 -- 34th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence October 4 - 7, 2011, Technical University, Berlin, Germany http://ki2011.de
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Important Date: August, 21th 2011: Early Registration Deadline. [Fair prices include discounts, day tickets and group rates.]
Full KI 2011 registrants have free admission to all invited technical talks of co-located events
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KI 2011 is the 34th edition of the German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, which traditionally brings together academic and industrial researchers from all areas of AI.
The technical program of KI 2011 consists of paper presentations and a variety of workshops and tutorials as well as some special events.
KI 2011 will take place in Berlin, Germany, October 4-7, 2011, and is a premier forum for exchanging news and research results on theory and applications of intelligent system technology.
This year, it will be co-located with - INFORMATIK 2011, the 41st Annual Meeting of the Gesellschaft für Informatik, and - MATES 2011, the 9th German Conference on Multi-Agent System Technologies.
All talks at KI 2011 will be presented in English.
Topic
The applications of Artificial Intelligence are abundant and widespread. In fact, Artificial Intelligence has become such a mainstay in today's world that it is taken for granted by the majority of people who benefit from its efficiency.
Therefore, the focus of the conference is on advances "Towards a Smart World - Evolving Technologies in AI"
The conference has invited original research papers from all areas of AI, its fundamentals, its algorithms, its history and its applications.
Program
October, 4th 2011 Workshops, Doctoral Mentoring and Showcases "German Open" (Robotic Soccer) and "General Game Playing"
October, 5th-7th Main conference program with invited talks and technical sessions
The program details and all up-to-date information is accessible via: http://ki2011.de
Conference Venue
This year's annual German conference on AI will take place at and near the campus of Technical University Berlin. TU Berlin has earned internationally acclaim for its excellence in research and education. It is attended by 30000 students, 3600 of these have enrolled in the school of electrical engineering and computer sciences. Together with Berlin's Humboldt-Universität and Freie Universität, several research institutes and many industry liaisons, the Technical University establishes Berlin as an important center of AI research, neural computation and cognitive robotics in Germany.
Berlin is a city of vivid contrasts, cultural diversity and tumultuous change. Berlin's many faces include a modern cosmopolitan capital, alternative lifestyles, a bustling arts scene, famous historical sites and fascinating contemporary architecture. Politics, culture and science are the driving forces of the city, turning Berlin to one of the most exciting metropoles of the world. The conference will take place directly after the German Unity Day celebrations on the 3rd of October, which will lend the city even more of an interesting air.
Co-location
KI 2011 is co-located with INFORMATIK 2011, the annual meeting of the German Informatics Society (Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V.). The topic of this year’s INFORMATIK 2011 conference is “Computer Science creates Communities” and it’s not only about virtual communities, but also real ones like the scientific community: How can we improve the networking within the computer science community and the connections to politics, industry, and society. How do we use new social media within the scientific communities? On the other hand the conference is also about research regarding the new technologies helping communities: From online social networks to software support for huge events or traffic guidance systems.
The INFORMATIK 2011 conference features a keynote day – Tag der Informatik – with invited talks by
Manfred Broy (TU München) Danny Dolev (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Constanze Kurz (HU Berlin) Martin Schallbruch (Bundesministerium des Innern) Max Senges (Google) Luc Steels (Free University of Brussels)
and more than 50 workshops, e.g., Automotive Software Engineering, Digital Social Networks, Enterprise Services Computing and Communities. There will be also a program for undergraduate and graduate students on open source software communities and a security contest.
Additionally, a third conference is co-located, the 9th German Conference on Multi-Agent System Technologies (MATES). MATES 2011 provides an interdisciplinary forum for researchers, users, and developers of intelligent agents and multi-agent systems. The conference focuses particularly on enabling technologies for truly open distributed systems -- covering a wide spectrum of approaches from self-organization to agreement computing. Out of more than 50 submissions, 12 full and 6 short papers were selected, resulting in an interesting scientific program during October 6th and 7th. MATES also will offer two invited talks on self-organization by Hartmut Schmeck (AIFB-KIT) and on organization by Olivier Boissier (EMSE, France).
More information on MATES 2011 can be found on http://www.ia.urjc.es/mates2011/.
Doctoral Consortium and Invited Panel
As the goal of the KI conference is to bring together researchers for an interesting exchange of ideas, it will attract PhD students, as well. These are especially addressed by the Doctoral Consortium (DC), which complements the program of talks, workshops and tutorials of the KI conference.
The aim of the DC is to support PhD students in all stages of their research in the field of AI. The DC wants to offer a platform for PhD students for presenting and discussing their results, ideas and planed work in a constructive atmosphere.
Moreover, each PhD student will be assigned to an experienced researcher who will act as a mentor and is going to provide detailed feedback and advice to help with their intended research. This often gives valuable external input and provides the opportunity to get in touch with different researchers to grow the personal academic network.
As a special feature of this year's DC there will be special discussion session. The topic of this session is to point out what good scientific practice in AI research really is, and what types of philosophy of science can be found in AI research. This session especially wants to reach out to doctorate students and wants to encourage a lively discussion. The invited panel for the doctoral consortium consists of
Bernhard Nebel, University of Freiburg Franz Baader, TU Dresden Ulrich Frank, University of Duisburg-Essen Ingo Timm, University of Trier
Invited Speakers
Luc Steels
"Powerful semantics can make language processing more robust"
Human language is an inferential coding system which means that not all information to interpret an utterance is explicitly communicated, it must be inferred. Moreover the meaning of human language passes by intermediary of rich conceptualizations of the world which are culture and language dependent. These two features make natural language processing very difficult and introduce a glass ceiling for statistical language processing. This talk describes a computational framework for embodied cognitive semantics that is grounded in the sensori-motor intelligence of (humanoid) robots. We have used this in language game experiments that examine how open-ended robust language processing is possible by exploiting as much as possible meaning. Concrete examples are given of cognitive functions needed in conceptualization, the representation of spatial and temporal categories, the configuration of new conceptualization strategies by recruiting cognitive functions, and the mapping of conceptualization to language. Luc Steels is professor of Computer Science (at the moment parttime) at the Free University of Brussels (VUB), founder and director (from 1983) of the VUB Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and co-founder and chairman (from 1990 until 1995) of the VUB Computer Science Department (Faculty of Sciences). Luc Steel's scientific research interests cover the whole field of artificial intelligence, including natural language, vision, robot behavior, learning, cognitive architecture, and knowledge representation. At the moment his focus is on dialogs for humanoid robots and fundamental research into the origins of language and meaning. Current work focuses on developing the foundations of semiotic dynamics and on fluid construction grammars.
Jörg Hoffmann
"Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Planning (But Were Afraid to Ask)"
Domain-independent planning is one of the long-standing sub-areas of AI, aiming at approaching human problem-solving flexibility. The area has long had an affinity towards playful illustrative examples, imprinting it on the mind of many a student as an area concerned with the rearrangement of blocks, and with the order in which to put on socks and shoes (not to mention the disposal of bombs in toilets). Working on the assumption that this "student" is you - the audience in earlier stages of their careers - the talk aims to answer three questions that you surely desired to ask back then already: What is it good for? Does it work? Is it interesting to do research in? Answering the latter two questions in the affirmative (of course!), the talk outlines some of the major developments of the last decade, revolutionizing the ability of planning to scale up, and our understanding of the enabling technology. Answering the first question, the talk points out that modern planning proves to be quite useful for solving practical problems - including, perhaps, yours.
Jörg Hoffmann is a Directeur de Recherche at INRIA, Nancy, France. Before joining INRIA, he worked at the University of Freiburg (Germany), Max Planck Institute for Computer Science (Saarbrücken, Germany), the University of Innsbruck (Austria), and SAP Research (Karlsruhe, Germany). He is the recipient of several awards including the 2002 award for the best European dissertation in AI, and 3 best paper awards at international journals and conferences. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, and a member of the Executive Council of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling.
Jörg Hoffmann's scientific interests concern the modeling, solution, and analysis of combinatorial search problems. His central area of research is AI Planning, but he has also worked on problems relating to SAT, Model Checking, and the Semantic Web. Most recently, he has developed a tool called "TorchLight", which one may imagine as a kind of fortune-teller for search performance in planning, and which Jörg Hoffmann hopes will eventually be able to replace himself in that role.
Sven Koenig
"Making Good Decisions: Case Studies in Planning and Coordination"
Intelligent systems (such as robots or decision-support systems) have to exhibit goal-directed behavior in real-time, even if they have only incomplete knowledge of their environment, imperfect abilities to manipulate it, limited or noisy perception or insufficient reasoning speed. Several research disciplines study how one can make good decisions, including artificial intelligence, theoretical computer science, operations research and economics. One can use ideas from these disciplines to build intelligent systems. I will present some examples from my research with a large number of collaborators and students to illustrate that one can often build even better systems when combining ideas from two or more of these disciplines.
The focus of this talk will be on replanning and auction-based coordination. Planning systems often need to replan quickly as their knowledge changes. Replanning from scratch is often very time-consuming but incremental heuristic search methods can be used to speed it up. I will give an overview of recent advances on incremental heuristic search. Similarly, teams of agents often need to coordinate. Auctions in economics deal with competitive agents that often have long decision cycles, while auction-based coordination systems deal with cooperative agents that often have to operate in real-time. I will give an overview of recent advances on market mechanisms for the allocation of resources in cooperative domains. I will use examples from robotics as running examples throughout the talk.
Sven Koenig is a professor in computer science at the University of Southern California. He received a diploma in Computer Science (Specialization: Compiler Construction) from University of Hamburg in 1992 and a Ph.D. degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University for his dissertation on Goal-Directed Acting with Incomplete In- formation. He also holds M.S. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University and is the recipient of an ACM Recognition of Service Award, an NSF CAREER award, an IBM Faculty Partnership Award, a Charles Lee Powell Foundation Award, a Raytheon Faculty Fellowship Award, a Mellon Mentoring Award, an SAIC Advisement Award, a Fulbright Fellowship and the Tong Leong Lim Pre-Doctoral Prize from the University of California at Berkeley. Most of his research centers around techniques for decision making (planning and learning) that enable single situated agents and teams of agents to act intelligently in their environments.
Sven Koenig is interested in intelligent systems that have to operate in large, nondeterministic, non-stationary or only partially known domains. Most of my research centers around techniques for decision making (planning and learning) that enable single situated agents (such as robots or decision-support systems) and teams of agents to act intelligently in their environments and exhibit goal-directed behavior in real-time, even if they have only incomplete knowledge of their environment, imperfect abilities to manipulate it, limited or noisy perception or insufficient reasoning speed. Applications of his research include planetary exploration, supplychain management, medicine, crisis management (such as oil-spill containment), robotics and real-time games (entertainment, serious games, training and simulation).
Michael Thielscher
"General Game Playing in AI Research and Education"
Introduced through the first AAAI Competition in 2005 as a new AI Challenge, General Game Playing has quickly evolved into an established research topic in Artificial Intelligence. More recently it is also gaining popularity as a useful addition to AI curricula at universities around the world. The first part of this talk will survey the research landscape of General Game Playing. The second part will demonstrate General Game Playing to be both a valuable tool for teaching Logic, Logic Programming, Planning, Search and Decision Making, and a great motivator for students to design and implement their own AI systems.
Michael Thielscher is an ARC Future Fellow and a Professor at The University of New South Wales. He is also an Adjunct Professor with the School of Computing and Mathematics at the University of Western Sydney. He received his postgraduate diploma in 1992 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1994, both with distinction, from Darmstadt University. He then joined Dresden University, where he was an associate professor before he moved to his present position. His Habilitation thesis was honored with the Award for Research Excellence by the alumni of Darmstadt University in 1998, and in 2009 he won a Future Fellowship Award from the Australian Research Council.
Michael Thielscher's current research is mainly in Knowledge Representation, Cognitive Agents and Robots, General Game Playing, and Constraint Logic Programming. He is author of over 100 refereed papers and four books, and he has co-authored the award-winning system FLUXPLAYER, which in 2006 was crowned the World Champion at the AAAI General Game Playing Competition.
Accepted Papers
We are happy to announce new research that makes a substantial technical contribution to the field and is placed in the context of existing work. KI 2011 also reports on new research or other issues of interest to the KI community: novel ideas; important implementation techniques; novel interesting benchmark problems; short experimental studies; interesting applications that are not yet completely solved or analyzed; position or challenge papers; etc. The conference proceedings will be published in the Springer Lecture Notes in AI (LNAI) series. All papers have been reviewed based on the standard criteria of clarity, relevance, significance originality, and soundness.
The review process was very selective. Out of 81 Technical Papers submitted this year (2 of which were withdrawn, and one was an only-abstract submission), the Program Committee accepted 32 (23 unconditionally, 5 of them conditionally and 4 subject to be shortened) for an acceptance ratio of 39.5%. Each accepted paper will have an oral presentation at the conference. Full technical papers were allowed up to 12 pages in the proceedings, while short papers were allowed up to 5 pages. All accepted papers will be presented at the conference.
Workshop and Tutorials
The workshops and the tutorial take place on Tuesday, Oct 4th. Also on Oct 4th, the showcases German Open (robotic soccer), and General Game Playing will be on exhibit.
5th Workshop Emotion and Computing - Current Research and Future Impact
Chair: Dirk Reichardt
In recent years computer science research has shown increasing efforts in the field of software agents which incorporate emotion. Several approaches have been made concerning emotion recognition, emotion modeling, generation of emotional user interfaces and dialogue systems as well as anthropomorphic communication agents. Motivations for emotional computing are manifold. From a scientific point of view, emotions play an essential role in decision making, as well as in perception and learning. Furthermore, emotions influence rational thinking and therefore should be part of rational agents as proposed by artificial intelligence research. Another focus is on human computer interfaces which include believable animations of interface agents.
The workshop focuses on the role of affect and emotion in computer systems including emotion recognition, emotion generation and emotion modeling with special attention to AI specific problems and applications. Both shallow and deep models of emotion are in the focus of interest. The goal is to provide a forum for the presentation of research as well as of existing and future applications and for lively discussions among researchers and industry. The presented papers should discuss theories, architectures and applications which are based upon emotional aspects of computing.
http://wwwlehre.dhbw-stuttgart.de/~reichard/itemotion/
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6th Workshop on Behaviour Monitoring and Interpretation (BMI'11)
Chairs: Björn Gottfried and Hamid Aghajan
Monitoring what happens in the environment, what people do and how they interact with their surroundings is of interest in several areas, such as in ambient intelligence, health care applications, or mobile services. This workshop focuses on methods analyzing and interpreting the behavior of individuals, or of small groups of people. This is for the purpose of intention recognition, triggering of smart home environment services, life routine logging, or generally for the investigation of how humans deal with specific problems in their everyday life.
While technological advances in sensing and processing have ushered in an unprecedented opportunity for realizing behavior monitoring applications, much effort remains needed for the development of methods to integrate and exploit the available data for addressing specific applications. In addition to the general BMI topic, part of this year's workshop features a thematic focus section on "User Behavior Modeling". Techniques and approaches to modeling user behaviors will be presented and discussed. Prospective authors are encouraged to submit a paper on the general BMI topic or contribute a more specific paper on "User Behavior Modeling".
http://www.tzi.de/~bjoerng/BMI-KI-11
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3rd Workshop on Dynamics of Knowledge and Belief - Evolving Knowledge in Theory and Applications
Chairs: Gabriele Kern-Isberner and Christoph Beierle
In recent years, intelligent agents in the contexts of open environments and multi agent systems have become a leading paradigm in AI. Acting successfully in such environments that are uncertain, only partially accessible, and dynamic, requires sophisticated knowledge representation and reasoning techniques for the modeling of the epistemic state of the agent. In particular, in evolving environments, the agent must continuously react to new observations and to any unforeseen changes that occur. Its epistemic state must undergo corresponding changes to provide the agent with a suitable world view at any time. Thus, modern knowledge representation methods have to deal with the evolution of knowledge and belief, due to uncertain or incomplete information, or to changes in the environment.
The 3rd Workshop on "Dynamics of Knowledge and Belief" organized by the GI-Fachgrupppe "Wissensrepräsentation und Schließen", follows two previous workshops at KI-2007 in Osnabrück and at KI-2009 in Paderborn. The focus of the workshop is on any topics of knowledge representation and reasoning that address the epistemic modeling of agents in open environments, and in particular on processes concerning evolving knowledge and belief both in theory and in applications.
http://www.fernuni-hagen.de/wbs/dkb2011.html
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26th Workshop on Planning& Scheduling, Configuration& Design (PuK 2011)
Chairs: Jürgen Sauer, Stefan Edelkamp and Bernd Schattenberg
The PuK workshop is the regular meeting of the special interest group on planning, scheduling, design and configuration within the AI section of the GI. As in previous years the PuK workshop brings together researchers and practitioners of the areas of planning, scheduling, design and configuration. It provides a forum for the exchange of ideas, evaluations and experiences especially in the use of AI techniques within these application and research areas.
As done in earlier workshops, the organizers intend to focus on a specific area of interest: This time it is the area of sophisticated problem solving techniques, e.g. swarm-based search or other agent-based approaches used in planning, scheduling and configuration systems. This focus shall also help to attract the workshop to practitioners in the field, who are invited to present practical problems and to discuss their experiences, concepts, and ideas. It is also intended to stimulate a mutual exchange with the researchers on our common field's future directions. Thus, a second main goal of this part of the workshop is the support of research planning.
http://www.puk-workshop.de/puk2011/index.html
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1st International Workshop on Algorithmic Intelligence
Chairs: Carsten Elfers, Rune Jensen, Hartmut Messerschmidt and Rasmus Pagh
Algorithmic Intelligence is a collective and pragmatic term for the range of algorithmic methods that have been identified as key revenue drivers in companies. The topic contrasts the term Artificial Intelligence in two ways: Firstly, while Artificial Intelligence carries some meaning that there is intelligence, but nothing real, Algorithmic Intelligence is focused on methods that solve a given problem. Secondly, if a method exists to solve a complex looking problem or give a good approximation of the solution, then this method belongs to Algorithmic Intelligence even if it is too simple to be called Artificial Intelligence. Algorithmic Intelligence also includes tackling optimization problems where there is no learning as such, but methods come in as a way of dealing with computational hardness. Hannah Bast will give an invited talk on Semantic Search.
http://www.tzi.de/~edelkamp/algorithmicintelligence
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Visibility in Information Spaces and in Geographic Environments
Chairs: Andreas Henrich, Christoph Schlieder, and Ute Schmid
The users of social media navigate in information spaces and at the same time, as embodied agents, they move in geographic environments. Both activities follow a similar type of information economy in which decisions by individuals or groups require a highly selective filtering to avoid information overload. In this context, visibility refers to the fact that in social processes some actors, topics or places are more salient than others. Formal notions of visibility include the centrality measures from social network analysis or the plethora of web page ranking methods. Recently, comparable approaches have been proposed to analyze activities in geographic environments: Place Rank, for instance, describes the social visibility of urban places based on the temporal sequence of tourist visit patterns.
The workshop aims to bring together researchers from AI, Geographic Information Science, Cognitive Science, and other disciplines who are interested in understanding how the different forms of visibility in information spaces and geographic environments relate to one another and how the results from basic research can be used to improve spatial search engines, geo-recommender systems or location-based social networks.
http://www.cogsys.wiai.uni-bamberg.de/KI11WSVisibility/KI11WSVisibility.html
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Workshop Context-Aware Intelligent Assistance (CAIA'2011)
Chairs: Stefan Mandl, Bernd Ludwig and Florian Michahelles
CAIA 2011 is the successor of last year’s workshop (CAIA 2010) where a consensus was researched about defining assistance as a concept relative to a main task or purpose of a system or user. This year workshop wants to gain a more in-depth understanding of this definition of assistance in context by studying interesting applications and investigating how far the definitions should be refined or revised. The organizers are especially interested in the interplay of context and assistance, as both are relative concepts.
They invite researchers and practitioners in the fields of recommender systems, pervasive computing, mobile computing, urban sensing, social networking, context-aware systems, human computer interaction, or similar, working on Assistance Systems - either from an application centered or a theoretical point of view - to present their work at CAIA 2011.
http://ursaminor.informatik.uni-augsburg.de/CAIA2011/welcome.html